Hello All.

Time for another casual, unplanned post that could make you think, and is worth repeating on Twitter and sounding smart. That kinda thing :-)

So, you may have already drawn the intended conclusion from the title, tipped yourself 80% and moved along, right? lol

If I've struck your curiosity, read on; it will give some nice things to think about. This could also have been that "10 ways that Bitcoin is the 'new' Email" and the sort, but then you gotta go grab relevant graphics for the countdown, and if you only have, like, 7 good points, it takes another hour not to just end up with filler content. So, I'm goin' with the first instinct here!

First of all, when email first came around, people had absolutely no clue.

"When should I use real mail, and when should I use email?"

"What's the @ sign do?"

"Won't the post office go out of business?"

"Why do we still fax things???"

Okay, perhaps this is now just becoming a valid list of questions, but the point is, that this generation doesn't give much, if any, thought to what the range of smart phones, pads, laptops, desktops has done to alter pieces of society that literally go back to horse and buggy days. Sending email, texts, pictures, videos via phones and email attachments is a remarkable technology that took years of code, protocols, failed security issues, server strength, managing back-end errors not to mention slow modem hook-ups that boggle the mind. For the most part, these days we just have it, use it, and even think of email as becoming OG compared to social DM chat etc. In it's time, the level of transformation that written communication could happen cheap or free, stamps could be saved for necessary mail like bills, and it didn't take a day, a week, a month for response to a letter. It was actually a revolution.

In walks crypto.

We have known, some of us, for a decade, right? If you were a mining nerd in 2009, you get dibs on the most experience here, but we all grasp the grassroots of Bitcoin, the transformative influence and protocol brought by Ethereum, and we can see that as the world wakes up to the reality of real, tangible, new digital money, they're about to get hit with the "what's the @ sign for?" part of Bitcoin.

Ripple focuses on remittance and updating a 3 decade-old banking back-end process, showing that wires cross-border can be handled instantly and for cheap, passing 'some' of the savings on to the customer, and pocketing a massive pile of extra $ on the bank's side of the transfer.

Eth makes it possible to build tons of things, including smart contracts, tokens, and an entire market of sometimes decent coins, and a whole lotta junk tokens thrown in the mix. The more tokens that release onto the market, the more volume is traded to the top of legit coins.

We have e-commerce about to make a massive stomp onto the blockchain. PayPal is now doing its part to make people confused about crypto, and Visa, JP Morgan, Bank of America are among the few admitting they've been "pro" crypto all along, and just wanted to buy up as much pre-pump BTC as possible.

Facebook Libra, named for the irony of entrapment coming, will be a very useful stable coin, used on their own platform, probably challenged as a monopoly, possibly bringing us to a currency war with China. Or not.

Can anyone imagine Amazon not being the next on the list to open millions of vendors to crypto payment exposure?

Institutional traders, bankers, independent whales are all shifting that 3% Bitcoin portfolio up to 5-10%, and it's only going to grow.

The vast majority of people are going to have absolutely no idea what the email-of-money is about to do. Blockchain, yeah, is the main thing that is going to transform society, from votes to grades, doctor's records to binding contracts. It's all going to live on the blockchain, and the definition of money will forever be changed. People can have things that act like fiat, collectibles, stores of value AND information all in the same field, as a new asset class that no one truly knows how to define or quantify.

Seriously, when is the last time you heard someone guess whether silver would be worth $5 or $79,000,000,000,000,000,000? You haven't, unless it was looney Uncle Lonnie that you visit twice/year at the "place where they keep him safe". But, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a year or two, a person who had the chance to acquire a $4000 Bitcoin at the worst of 2020, might suddenly be worth $200K, and that is now seen as conservative.

So yeah, Bitcoin is the new email. It will update things that need updating, while the old fiat, the old contracts, the old fax machines and use of clouds and servers and the sort will all continue in parallel, while the usability of global assets are being digitized on the blockchain. Once the world starts to catch on, they'll jump into the low-quality Hotmail, Yahoo and dare I say Geocities of the crypto world (you decide which junk tokens apply). Eventually, they'll figure out that blockchain and crypto are not just a new way of doing things, but they are a re-classification, a re-definition of so many things that we used to think of as separate. 2021 is poised to be the year that we deserved before a political virus screwed up the globe. Some of us traded, some of us freaked out, and apparently a few of us passed away. The rest of us are, hopefully, stronger for it, and realize that some of the hopes and dreams that got us geared up this time 2019, are still on track to make a huge dent in global finance and collecting ridiculous imaginary things. So, there ya go! Crypto!!!!!

Or, dare I say "@Crypto"?

And, on that note, Gordon Freeman, Crypto Super Hero, Friend to the tokenized inbox, leader of undefined un-led things... out.